Diablo 3 Review Roundup

After such much publicized server problems, millions of people are finally playing Diablo 3. After so many years waiting, how does this game deliver? What do the critics say of this highly anticipated game? And more importantly, do you agree? Check out our review round-up for some thoughts on the game and when you finally get a chance to play it yourself, let us know your own opinion in the comments below!

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Loved it

Diablo’s always been a complex game powered by simple things, and to impulses such as greed and violence you can now add curiosity. Stat-tweaking, loadouts, bespoke resources: the campaign is both laboratory and sweetshop, offering depth as well as sugary fanboy excess. The end result is an embarrassment of rewards, an endless nested arrangement of gifts, levels, abilities, items, runes, sigils, achievements, and AI followers to play alongside.

This is not the most adventurous action RPG on the market, then, but its razor-sharp and uncompromising focus on structure and mechanics ensures it's one of the most playable. Diablo III quite simply revels in being a video game, and when a game is this well-executed it's impossible to resist those charms.

The Guardian
So the key question remains, was Diablo 3 worth the 12-year wait? That depends on how you play it – for single players, it's an entertaining and gorgeous-looking dungeon hack but it's a bit short, extremely linear and hardly pushing any boundaries. Playing online (and Blizzard isn't really giving us a choice) makes it a better balanced and more compelling challenge, with all the potential to be the kind of lifestyle substitute that Diablo's legion of hunter-gatherer fans should relish.

It’s been a long, long wait, but it was all worth it. With Diablo III, Blizzard made one of the most approachable and enjoyable games in the world even better. In fact, aside from the annoying online-only infrastructure, I can’t imagine a single thing I would change to make this game better. That’s when you know you have a classic on your hands, and that’s also when you know you should play this game as much as you can.

Diablo 3 is more than slick, and more than deep. It's a turbo-charged romp through the conventions of action, role-playing and online games that plays to the gallery but tears up the rulebook on the sly. It has been awfully compromised by its launch and by the lack of an offline mode, but it deserves better than to be remembered for that. And I'm certain it won't be.

Taking place 20 years after the events of its predecessor, Diablo 3's puts an enjoyable cap on the trilogy. While Blizzard has mentioned that this won't be the last we see of Sanctuary, the setting of the Diablo series, this is the end of the tale surrounding the demon lords, soulstones and one unfortunate town by the name of Tristram. It might have been nice to see just a little more ambition after 12 years since Diablo 2, but Diablo 3 nonetheless delivers on that endless drive to click your way to power, glory and shinier loot.